Cold weather

I miss heating with a wood stove. I miss the smell of a wood fire in the home. I miss cutting wood. In the forest, I miss that adrenaline rush of planning and felling a tree. I miss splitting wood, especially by hand. Each strike of the maul is like a mini battle of will. Can I convince my body to brutally and precisely repeatedly strike the log until it surrenders.  I miss stacking wood into long rows neatly ready for curing. I miss seeing the stacks of wood, so similar to a fully stocked larder, ready to heat our home.

It is cold here in Berkeley this morning. Not cold like it is in the rest of the United States. The sun will rise, it will bask into our front room and warm our poorly insulated home. By 9:30 am it will be very comfortable. Right now at 5:50 am I am cold. We don't have a real heating source. We could plug in some electric oil filled heaters.


Last time we did that it cost us a fortune on the next electricity bill--worst of all it wasn't really that much warmer.

We have an awesome woodstove


but I'd need to reline the chimney. I have done it before when we lived in Missouri. The main obstacle is there is no place to efficiently get wood. Plus the lining materials to do the job are about $700.

My Berkeley solution will be solar/radiant heat. I just acquired the final expensive part for our solar thermal system. I needed the pump, it had to be strong enough to lift my solar storage water to the peak of our roof. I couldn't afford to buy one since they are about $700. I was gifted two of them, one as back-up. They were from a commercial radiant heat removal. The plumber was going to throw them away.

Now I just need to finish the kitchen so I can install our solar heating system.

Kitchen remodel ensues...

I had to tear up the rotten flooring down to the joists.

I put in new sub-floor. The eventual final finish will be cork. 

This sub-floor was salvageable it just smells like La Brea tar pits. I scraped off the old tiles and tar to a level surface. 

I am starting to put sheet rock back on the ceiling. I insulated the exposed attic space and wired cans for the proposed lighting over the dining table and cutting board island. 

These three light cans will center on the table. See my crazy foam board and foam spray combination insulating?

This the wall behind the refrigerator, wall-oven, and pantry shelves

I'll plaster this back nice when I finish out the rest of the room. 

We got a Christmas tree the other day.

And, Georgi is a monkey girl.

Moving the main support column

We are getting our kitchen cabinets from IKEA. We priced around and looked at the competition. We decided on IKEA because they have wonderfully designed modern space saving and uber-convenience features. IKEA also has an awesome kitchen designer in browser app. It is sluggish but worth the trouble.

The problem I was having is we have a couple of columns (bumps) on both long walls that support a huge beam. It was making it impossible for me to position cabinets. Originally, I was going to hack into the affected cabinets and just have the column crowd into them. Not a pretty solution. As I got more and more involved I realised that this crowding wasn't going to work on fancy cabinets because things like glass shelves and complex lighted drawers can't abide this sort of thing.

Here is one of the columns, the one on the other side of the room. They were pretty much the same.

Here is the exact beam a few days ago.

the plastic is attached to it, just to the left of Kassi.

I wanted to move the support column into the wall cavity. The overhead beam didn't extend into the wall cavity so I had to get creative. I hammered in a 4by4 shoring to support the beam leaving room for me to work on the old column. I also used a bottle jack and another 4by4 to ever-so-slightly lift the beam. The house creaked in protest. My adrenaline was coursing through my body. I do stuff like this at work all the time but having a safety net of a corporation and insurance keeps my head cool. Here I cannot make any mistakes because I cannot afford them.

I had to remove the old column and floor blocking. The blocking was bad and the column was in my way. I opened up the wall bay and made room for my new beam. I still needed to attach the vertical column to the beam and decided on a steel angle bracket that I could hide within the sheetrock compound.

I went to the local steel yard and got a big piece on angle-iron. I buy steel from them for work all the time and I told them it was for me personally (almost free). I drilled the stump of angle-iron and notched my cut to length 4by4 post.

Here is what my bracket ended up looking like.

And here it the new column hidden in the wall cavity in all its glory.

Sorry, it is a bit blurry. On the left you can see my insulating efforts. I buy rigid foam insulation, cut it to fit then I foam the edges to make a hermetic seal. I cannot use fluffy fiberglass insulation because my old house doesn't have a vapor barrier and any absorbent insulation acts like a sponge and causes things to rot. Someday soon I'll insulate, hang a vapor barrier and re-side my house.

New back door

Here is what our old door looked like.

I took out the door and that old window on the right. I installed a temporary header to carry the rafters while I ripped out that door and made the opening large enough for french doors.

I reused the removed siding and patched the window hole. 

Tabitha helped me tear up some more of the flooring and clean the mess. See the new window on the right? 

Here is the new larger opening. We can actually see our backyard.

New french doors.

This is their new home.

These doors were a pain in the butt to get hung properly. Between the old house and manufacturing discrepancies it took quite a while to get them to operate smoothly.

Kitchen progress.

The windows and door came today. I tore out the old crappy back door. The hole must be larger for the double french doors. I had to support the roof while installing a new header over the french doors. 

Panorama photos are great but skew things so much it is difficult to tell what is going on. I am standing where the fridge will go and spun from the back door toward the makeshift kitchen behind the plastic on the right. Tabitha and I installed the two windows on the exterior wall of the dining area. 

Tomorrow I'll install the french doors and probably tear up more of the floor.

Kitchen remodel

We are in the throughs of remodeling our kitchen. We are moving the kitchen toward the center of the house. I moved essential kitchen "things" from the old kitchen area (the new breakfast dining area) to a cramped makeshift kitchen.

This photo Kassiopeia is standing right in front of Fritz-the-dishwasher looking into the deconstruction zone.

Toly and I are tearing off the old drywall. I needed access to re-wire and re-plumb. I am enlarging the windows for a light dining area. Windows are waiting for me to pick them up. I must eat breakfast first.

Kassiopeia, her awesome hair, is helping bag the old walls.

The wiring was scary. Knob and tube, and romex wired together in-wall. sketchy...

Homedepot supply run.

Toly is an excellent helper. 

keeping busy

Tools in hand, learning life skills that will serve him well. 

Work like this is always a family affair. I can't imagine doing this stuff without their help. Tristan will always do the crappy job because he understand that is usually the MOST helpful thing he can do.

I'm off to get my windows...

Leaky Pipes

The cold water supply pipe sprung a leak Friday. I immediately bought one of those pipe wrap clamps to stop the leak. Everyone with old galvanized pipe should have one or two of these in their emergency tools/parts.

The following day I bought the necessary fittings and pipe to fix the leak and re-plumb the entire cold water plumbing.  As I started working, gathering supplies and tools Toly (age 7) asked Whatcha? I asked him if he wanted to help. He gleefully said sure.

Crawling under our house is not as bad as some crawl spaces I have been in. Working on hands and knees makes for slow grueling work. Toly was instrumental in helping gather, transport tools and supplies to the further reaches of the crawl space. I explained exactly what we were doing and he really really helped. I had him trace the cold line and put tape on all the cold pipes as a marker. We didn't want to cut any of the hot water supply lines or, God forbid, any of the gas lines. It is a tangled mess of pipe doubling back and forth of hot, cold and gas lines. Together we sized up the entire cold supply to all the fixtures in the baths, kitchen, utility/laundry room, outside spigots and water heater supply. We formed a plan to logically and efficiently re-route all the cold water plumbing.

We did as much prep work as possible while the dishwasher and laundry machine finished their cycles. When it came time to start cutting on the pipe we needed buckets to catch the residual water. Toly scampered from under the house and retrieved some buckets. Water still got everywhere regardless of our efforts to the contrary. Luckily the entire crawl-space is covered in billboard tarp. Otherwise we would have been more than soggy. We would have been covered in mud and watery filth.

I showed Toly how to clean pipe and fittings. I taught him the different sizes that we were using and the different names for the fittings. We referenced shapes and angles from his everyday life. He really paid attention and I could see several leaps in understanding in his brain as they occurred. We were under there for a few hours my knees were killing me and my legs were cramping. He had been helping all this time without any promise of reward or special favor.

As I rested in a dryish spot I explained to him how helpful he was being to me and that the deserves a special treat. He is still undecided what it will be as yet. After we cleaned, fluxed and fit together the pipe we braced it  and I showed Toly how to solder the fittings together. Melting metal fascinated him. The tiny droplets of excessive solder were an especially big hit. We used a few sharkbite fittings in places were it is impossible to safely use a torch. Sharkbite fittings are way too expensive to use everywhere but sometimes necessary.

Here is some of the pipe that we removed we left an entire abandoned 50 foot section attached to the rafters because it can wait until next time.

 It feels so good to have re-plumbed all the cold supply lines in copper. No more drinking water from old galvanized pipe. A major leap forward in making our home "RIGHT"

The next step will be to replace all the hot water pipe. Even though there are fewer hot water fixtures re-plumbing the hot water pipe will be at least equally as complicated because I want to install a recirculating loop to the water heater so that we don't continue to waste water while waiting for it to get hot.

A daunting obstacle

Our backyard had been overrun with bamboo. The previous tenants simply let it invade. Invade it did. Several months ago both our side neighboring fences blew over during a wind storm. We promptly bought new fencing and replaced the fence on the west side of our house. The east side was a bit more daunting. It is where most of the bamboo was encroaching. I needed to address the invasion before committing to building a fence. It took several months to muster the courage to begin this task. Winter illness, then a new baby, then life generally got in the way. Now O'Melay birthday season is upon us. Tristan says all he wants for his birthday is to have his room done. The precursor to being able to do his room has been completing the east fence.

Tristan is a good boy and totally deserves his own room. So in an effort to try to get his room ready for his birthday in August last weekend Friday I started digging the trench for the bamboo guard.

Several blisters later and a mild sun burn I buried the heavy plastic barrier two and a half feet deep. Everywhere you see exposed dirt was completely thick with bamboo culms. Miserable digging--not as bad as Ozark rocky clay soil though.

It isn't actual bamboo guard. I couldn't afford the official product. What I installed is super heavy PVC roofing material I was given recycled from a commercial roofing company.

I used the concrete rubble to hold it in place while I back filled.

The following Friday (this past Friday) I started the fence. digging holes, pouring cement and letting it set over night. This morning we hung all the planks and voilà... a fence

Then later this evening we got ambitious and planted our fruit trees. It is finally our home. Fruit trees = Future food and sustainability.

the super dwarf peach

the dwarf meyer lemon

the blenheim apricot 

and a santa rosa plum

Best of all they are now protected from that bad bamboo.

Our back tomatoes seem to be doing ok. The tree collard on the right and some swiss chard on the left.

 Tomatos tied to our bean arch.

 Cucumbers should start climbing on the other side soon.

 The compost bins that I built a few weeks ago to take the extra compost from berkeley free compost. They were mostly full a few weeks ago.

 Rome picked out a Romneya poppy, we'll plant it very soon.